Bay Area Displacement Spreads to Sacramento

"As Bay Area residents and others flock to Sacramento to escape the housing crisis, low-income renters in the capital find themselves on shaky ground," reports Katy Murphy.

The Urban Displacement Project at the University of California, Berkeley has found evidence of gentrification and displacement in Sacramento. The study, the first-ever analysis of gentrification Sacramento, finds "an astonishing 95,000 low-income households live in Sacramento neighborhoods that 'are already undergoing or are at risk of becoming hotbeds of displacement,'" writes Murphy.

The study also examines a 13-county mega-region for signs of the housing crisis. Murphy summarizes those larger findings as follows:

Across the 13 counties studied, 900,000 low-income households — 62 percent of the low-income population — lived in gentrifying neighborhoods, researchers found. Far-flung cities such as Antioch and Pittsburg were not immune. In eastern Contra Costa County, researchers noted, the ranks of the homeless grew by 30 percent between 2015 and 2016.